Gain Sense

From left to right - Nora, Kat, Swann, and Autumn. Editor’s note: Although the author has not revealed major plot points, some spoilers are unavoidable. As always, be sure to play the game first if you are interested in experiencing the story for yourself. From the makers of Life is Strange , Lost Records: Bloom and Rage is a familiar experience to anyone who has played DON'T NOD’s games. There’s a slew of dialogue options to choose from and a story wrapped in tragedy and nostalgia, fused with a supernatural twist. Yesterday I finished the game, and my initial impressions are very positive, with a few constructive critiques about characterization that I'll ruminate on below. When you think of DON'T NOD, the first game to come to mind is likely Life is Strange.  If I had to compare Lost Records to it, Life is Strange had more innovative gameplay thanks to Max’s time reversal power. Lost Records , on the other hand, substitutes time reversal and powers in general for a cam...

The space 4X genre is one of my favorites (4X stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate"). As a kid I played games like Galactic Civilizations II, and later on I was always eager to jump into games like Endless Space, Distant Worlds, and StarDrive. But of them all, Stellaris is probably my favorite.  In Stellaris your goal is relatively simple: Develop your spacefaring civilization in any way you deem fit. You can stick to one star system and pour all of your resources into a hyper-advanced ecumenopolis, or you can choose to be more expansionary, sending scouts to nearby stars and colonizing outwards. You can be a warring civilization or a peaceful one, you can choose the direction of your society's research, you can prioritize certain resources over others, you can engage in diplomacy and market manipulation, and you can build spy networks to snoop on AI opponents. And there is much more beyond that.  Here I want to spin for you a tale about a playthrough I had a...

  Good morning everyone and welcome to another article! This is one I've been thinking about for a while now, and yet could never find the time to write. I'll admit, it's been some time since I've played the first two Trails of Cold Steel games (I have yet to play three and four for reasons explained below), but my impression of them is still rather clear. Conversely, I just finished playing Persona 4 Golden and finished Persona 5 a few years back, so both are fresh in my mind.  As a disclaimer, this isn't so much a critique of either series (as I very much enjoy both) so much as it is a comparison of certain aspects that stood out to me. I will also attempt to avoid spoilers as best I can. Finally, I'll organize the article into categories so that you can skip to the part you want to read. Without further ado, let's begin!  Story The Cold Steel games take place within a much larger universe dubbed "The Legend of Heroes," and are technically the si...

Donovan Mitchell would be a consistent part of this would-be Cavaliers dynasty. What if I told you that the Cleveland Cavaliers would make it to five championship appearances in six years? And what if I told you that, with all that success, they'd only come away with one title to hang their proverbial hats on? This is the story of the fictional Cleveland Cavaliers in my most recent playthrough of NBA 2K23's MyNBA mode. A team with success nearly unmatched in the annals of NBA history. Multiple MVP caliber players on the same team, an all-star starting five lineup, and a dominant regular and postseason season run that makes LeBron's efforts from 2015-2018 look quaint in comparison.  From time to time, as some readers know, I like to write about the stories I uncover while playing videogames. One of my favorite story generators is the NBA 2K series, mainly because I like basketball, but also because its franchise mode lends itself to the creation of thoroughly random but alwa...

Lengthy videogame retrospectives are the norm rather than the exception these days. Games like Skyrim now have 20 hour retrospectives that, while generally being of exceedingly high quality and enjoyable to watch, got me thinking about a controversial topic: Race in videogames.  Just how are videogame retrospectives and race are related? To me it has to do with  who  is creating these retrospectives and  how  this impacts their analysis of games. It's not controversial to say that most of the YouTubers creating these retrospectives are white men without degrees in history or related analytical disciplines. Even so, they present their conclusions with the confidence of a scholars speaking from the pulpit of an Ivy League lecture hall.  When it comes to discussing topics like race and racism, I believe they are lacking some nuance in their analysis.  A select few of these retrospective creators are so confident that they've begun weaving critic...

  Shionne (left) and Alphen (right), the game's main characters. Warning: Spoilers Ahead These days I don't have much time, so it's rare that I finish long sprawling RPGs like  Tales of Arise . But finish it I did, and so I figured I'd take the time to jot down some of the thoughts on the game. To sum up, my initial impressions were very positive. I liked the protagonist, I liked the graphics, and I found the combat to be a nice improvement over the last  Tales  game I played,  Tales of Vesperia  (admittedly I have not finished this one).  As the game wore on, I ran into several roadblocks that tend to arise (sorry) in most Japanese RPGs (or JRPG for short): the enemies got tougher, requiring some grinding. The bosses had overinflated health pools, and money and other important battle items like  Arise 's equivalent of health potions became scarce. Maybe I am less dedicated than the average gamer these days, but I felt obligated to buy the double ...

The Battle of Bloody Brook, September 18th, 1675 Editor's note: Parenthetical citations with associated page numbers are provided where necessary. In the late 1990s historians became re-interested in writing about seventeenth century New England's bloodiest conflict: King Philip's War (1675-1676). In 1999 alone, the following books were published: Jill Lepore's  The Name of War,  James D. Drake's  King Philip's War: Civil War in New England 1675-1676 , and finally, the subject of this article, Schultz and Tougias'  King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict .  All of these books emphasized different aspects of the war. Lepore analyzed seventeenth and eighteenth century literature on King Philip's War to show that English colonizers wrote of it in a way that exonerated themselves of the violence they committed against Native Americans. Drake looked to the decades prior to the war, arguing that colonizers and Native p...

  Structural racism, also known as systemic or societal racism, is more deeply entrenched in our working culture than you think. A quick google search on the definition of structural racism gives us the following: "A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. It identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with 'whiteness' and disadvantages associated with 'color' to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist." [1] This brings us to the point of this article: we need a revised definition for structural racism—one that hones in on what it is and how it affects people of color. While the above definition is effective ...

  Editor's note: This article is based on a talk delivered by Professor Gregory Downs in 2017.  In 2013, the Shelby v. Holder U.S. Supreme Court decision gave states permission to change their election laws without needing advance clearance from the Department of Justice. This decision invalidated a portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required preclearance with the DoJ to protect voters of color. Most people might ask: How did we get to this point? But history professor Gregory Downs (UC Davis) believes this as the wrong question. The United States, he argues, has never been a country where the government guaranteed the right to vote. Indeed, the United States is a country with a tradition of disenfranchisement, rather than enfranchisement. In his talk titled “Voting Rights Under Fire,” Downs argued that U.S. history could be defined by the struggle to expand and retract the vote. Far from being a recent development, “challenging registration laws and low voter turnou...